Experience suggests that there are some things that can be done to increase efficient cooperation and complementarity between the formal and informal justice sectors, but most of these involve creating political space for local community leaders and government officials to negotiate and improve cooperation, rather than relying on quick fixes such as training sessions that tend to be proposed by international donors. While there may be some benefit to programs that encourage structural issues, the key for their success is cooperation between local leaders and government officials.
Challenges and Concerns in US/P's Work
While achieving some successes, USIP's initiatives also highlight clear challenges that all justice projects face in Afghanistan.
Monitoring and Evaluation
One of the greatest challenges, particularly for small-scale projects with limited staff and funds,is conducting effective monitoring and evaluation. Monitoring and evaluation is too often dismissed as an auxiliary aspect of projects and sometimes as a waste of resources. Instead, monitoring and evaluation should be used to constantly test project assumptions, providing ongoing feedback that can be used to adjust a project to shifting conditions. If programs are to be context-responsive, they need to be iterative and capable of adjusting to meet the changing demands of the local community.
Ideally, research on dispute resolution would include surveys and interviews of all those involved in the dispute resolution process, outside observers, and baseline data collection. The scope of most of the programs funded by USIP, however, combined with challenges such as security and limited access to certain areas, meant that evaluations in each project had to be targeted and small in scope. Most projects used different approaches: NRC relied heavily on a series of "knowledge, attitudes, and practices" questionnaires that measured understandings of the formal sector but did not necessarily reveal much about satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) with informal systems. CPAU evaluated its work more qualitatively, through a series of interviews that were more in-depth but less able to assess change since they were less effective at establishing a measurable baseline. CPAU augmented its questionnaires with some quantitative studies, while TLO remained primarily qualitative.
If programs are to be context-responsive, they need to be iterative and capable of adjusting to meet the changing demands of the local community.
These approaches, in turn, created certain biases, which in some cases revealed beneficial insights to specific aspects of the informal system but in other instances made the comparison of results difficult. For example, TLO has developed strong networks of elders that it depends upon for the majority of its information. his provides a level of depth about the local political lands